Dr. Vikramaditya “Vikram” Prakash is an architect, architectural historian and theorist. He is Professor of Architecture at the University of Washington with adjunct appointments in Landscape Architecture and Urban Design and Planning. He received his B. Arch. from Chandigarh College of Architecture, India and his M.A. and PhD in History of Architecture and Urbanism from Cornell University. He was named as one of the 2020 ACSA Distinguished Professors.
Vikram works on issues of modernism, postcoloniality, global history and fashion & architecture. His books include Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India, A Global History of Architecture (with Francis DK Ching & Mark Jarzombek), Colonial Modernities (co-edited with Peter Scriver), The Architecture of Shivdatt Sharma and Chandigarh: An Architectural Guide. A Global History is widely used as a textbook and being translated into five languages. His next book, One Continuous Line: Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Aditya Prakash, is due in summer 2020.
Vikram is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Built Environments. He previously served as Associate Dean for External Affairs, Chair of Architecture and Director of Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Programs. His public service includes terms on the Boards of Seattle Center and the Seattle AIA. He also directed Chandigarh Urban Lab, a series of interdisciplinary international studios.
Vikram is co-PI (with Mark Jarzombek, MIT) of three successive grants of $1.0 million (2014), $1.5 million (2016) and $1.0 million (2019) awarded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. These resulted in the creation of GAHTC – a collective of over 200 teachers of global architectural history.
Vikram is host of ArchitectureTalk – a bi-weekly podcast based on curated conversations with invited guests. In its first two years, ArchitectureTalk received over 120,000 unique downloads and has been independently reviewed in The American Scholar.
Vikram is co-Founder and Design Principal of OUR: Office of (Un)certainty Research, a design research practice dedicated to rethinking architecture in terms of the emergent scientific, social and political parameters of the 21st century.
Vikram grew up in Chandigarh, India. He lives in Seattle with his wife and three children. He loves poetry, and is a modern dance and theater enthusiast. His current research is on Fashion and Architecture, or Body-Architecture, an experiment in trying to cross-pollinate diverse disciplinary design intelligences, focussed especially on the work of Alexander McQueen and Enric Miralles (with Carme Pinos and Benedetta Tagliabue).